Portfolio Editor

Contents

In Stock Investor, you can create your own portfolios—unique groups of stocks you find interesting, the stocks in a market index, or the results of a stock screen. Portfolios allow you to examine a list of stocks from update to update without having to sift through Stock Investor’s entire database.

Additional benefits of using Portfolios include:

View several companies in a singular list;

Create statistical summary reports that show the characteristics of a portfolio;

Export data on a groups of stocks for further analysis or use in another program; and

Perform additonal screens against a specific group of stocks.

It is important to note, however, that Stock Investor does not provide portfolio-tracking capabilities. In our discussion here, a portfolio is simply a collection of companies that you specify.

Creating a Portfolio

There are three ways to access the Portfolio Editor: click on the Portfolio Editor button on the toolbar, select Portfolio Editor from the Tools menu (Tools - Portfolio Editor), or simultaneously press the Alt and P keys on the keyboard (Alt + P).

Following any of these methods will open the Screen Editor window:

Now you can create new portfolios or edit existing portfolios. You can browse the database for companies you want in a portfolio by either company name or by ticker symbol. However, to avoid potential complications created by abbreviations, it is best to select companies by ticker symbol.

Finding Companies By Ticker

To browse by ticker, make sure the By Ticker option is selected on the Portfolio Editor and start typing the ticker. Note that you will not see a blinking cursor in the Find box, so just start typing.

The company name and ticker will appear in the scroll box above where you are typing:

Finding Companies By Name

If you do not know the company’s ticker, select By Name and begin typing the company’s name. Note that you will not see a blinking cursor in the Find box, so just start typing.

The company name and ticker will appear in the scroll box above where you are typing:

Adding Companies to Portfolio

After typing in a company name or ticker, and when the company you wish to add to your portfolio is highlighted in blue, you add it to the portfolio by pressing the Enter key, double-clickin on the company within the scroll box, or by clicking the Add button. Doing so will add the company to the list on the right side of the Portfolio Editor window:

Saving a Portfolio

When you are finished adding companies to the portfolio, click on the Save button and the program will prompt you to name the portfolio:

Type in the name you wish to use for the portfolio (and a description if you want) and click on the Ok button in the Save Portfolio window.

When you are finished, click the Close at the bottom of the Portfolio Editor window.

Editing an Existing Portfolio

Once you have created and saved a portfolio, you can slso edit them. In order to edit the Oil Stocks portfolio we created earlier, we must re-open the Portfolio Editor using anyb of the methods outlined earlier.

To load a portfolio you want to edit, select it from the pull-down menu at the top of the Portfolio Editor window:

Once a Portolio is loaded, its name will appear in the Name area and the companies in the portfolio will appear on the right side of the Portfolio Editor window.

If we want to remove Halliburton from this Oil Stocks portfolio, click on the gray square found to the left of Halliburton in the text box on the right-hand side of the Portfolio Editor:

This will select Sara Lee Corp. To remove the selected company from the portfolio, click on the Delete button in the lower left-hand corner of the Portfolio Editor window. This will remove Sara Lee from the portfolio. If you wish to overwrite the original portfolio and save the portfolio that reflects the changes you have made, click Save. However, if you wish to keep the edited portfolio as well as the original portfolio, click on Save As. You will then be prompted to name and describe the new portfolio, at which point this portfolio will be saved and the original portfolio kept intact.

Using Portfolios

To work with a portfolio, you need to apply it to Stock Investor’s active notebook. Click on the down arrow of the Portfolio pull-down menu on the toolbar to reveal your list of saved portfolios. Selecting our Chicago Stocks portfolio will load the list of companies contained in the portfolio into the stock notebook.

After loading this portfolio, the active notebook should look like the one in Figure 3. Note that the *Share Statistics View has been applied to the active notebook (click the down arrow of the View pull-down menu on the toolbar for the list of views that are available; those designated with an asterisk are built into the software).

Importing a Portfolio

Stock Investor allows you to import a list of ticker symbols into the Portfolio Editor to save you from having to choose companies manually. You can import a portfolio from an external file, created using any of a variety of programs. In order for the process to succeed, however, the file must be a text file containing only ticker symbols. Additional information or characters—tabs, commas, and quotation marks—cannot be imported by the Portfolio Editor.

To begin the importing process, open the Portfolio Editor. In the Portfolio Editor window, click on the Import button. This will open a window where you can locate and specify which ticker file you wish to import (Figure 4). Once you have selected the file, click on the Import button in the Open window. If the import process is successful, a window will appear telling you how many tickers were added to the portfolio, how many of the tickers in the import file were already in the portfolio, and how many could not be identified and, consequently, were not imported (Figure 5).

If any of the tickers could not be identified, an Unidentified Tickers window will appear, displaying how the tickers are formatted (Figure 6). In this example, quotation marks and an invalid ticker symbol were the culprits. After importing the ticker symbols into a portfolio, you can save it just as you would if you had manually selected the symbols.

Saving Screening Results as Portfolios

One final way to create a portfolio is to save the results of a stock screen as a portfolio. Stock Investor comes with over 50 predefined stock screens and also allows you to create your own. Once you have applied a particular screen—either by selecting a screen from the Screen pull-down menu at the top of the Stock Investor window or by clicking on the Apply button for a selected screen in the Screen Editor—you can save the companies passing the screen as a portfolio. To do this, click on the File menu at the top of the Stock Investor Program window and then select Save Notebook as Portfolio (File - Save Notebook as Portfolio). The program will then prompt you to name the portfolio and, if you wish, provide a description of the portfolio. When you are finished, select OK and Stock Investor will save the portfolio. Portfolios that are created in this fashion are also accessible from the View pull-down menu and can be edited from within the View Editor.

Applying Screens to Screens

Occasionally, a subscriber will ask us how to run a screen against another screen in Stock Investor. One way to do this is by using a portfolio. Begin by running the first screen: either select it from the Screen pull-down menu at the top of the Stock Investor Program window, or apply the screen within the Screen Editor. You can then save the companies that pass the screen as a portfolio, following the steps we just outlined. Next, load that portfolio into the Stock Notebook by selecting it from the Portfolio pull-down menu at the top of the Stock Investor window. Finally, load the second screen by either selecting it from the Screen pull-down menu at the top of the Stock Investor Program window or by applying the screen within the Screen Editor. (In this same fashion, you can run screens against custom portfolios as well.)

As an example, we would like to see which stocks pass both the *IBD Stable 70 screen and the *EPS Est Revisions Up screen. To begin, we select the *IBD Stable 70 screen from the Screen pull-down menu (Figure 7). After the screen runs, there are 51 companies in the Stock Notebook (as of October 22, 2004). We then click on the File menu and select Save Notebook as Portfolio (Figure 8). When prompted, we save this portfolio as IBD 2004-10-22 and click Ok in the Save Notebook as Portfolio window.

We then load the IBD portfolio we saved into the Stock Notebook by selecting it from the Portfolio pull-down menu. Lastly, we select the *EPS Est Revisions Up screen from the Screen pull-down menu. When the screen is completed, three of the 51 companies that were in the IBD 2004-10-22 portfolio also passed the earnings revision screen—CAI International, Inc., Johnson & Johnson, and ScanSource, Inc. (Figure 9).